科学美国人60秒 SSS 游客照片有助于非洲野生动物普查（在线收听）

This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是克里斯托弗·因塔格里塔。

Tracking wildlife is a tough job. Take the case of a one-eared leopard named Pavarotti. For this guy: ("Nessun Dorma" clip) "He was a very big beautiful male, and he had a very, very deep, deep roar, and so they named him after Pavarotti."

追踪野生动物是项艰巨的工作。以一只名为“帕瓦罗蒂”的独耳猎豹为例。这就是“帕瓦罗蒂”：（《今夜无人入睡》片段）“它是只体型极为庞大而且非常美丽的雄性猎豹，它的吼叫声非常非常低沉，因此人们为其取名为‘帕瓦罗蒂'。”

Kasim Rafiq, a wildlife biologist at Liverpool John Moores University.

利物浦约翰摩尔大学的野生动物生物学家卡西姆·拉菲克说到。

"So I u?sed to get up at the crack of dawn, follow his tracks and try and find him. So one day, I went out, and I was looking for him. And his tracks took me off road through this woodland area....and..."

“我过去常在黎明时分起床，找到它的足迹，然后跟随足迹并试图找到它。有一天我出门寻找它。它的足迹将我带离道路，进入森林地区……”

Before he knew it, the wheel of his Land Rover was stuck in a warthog burrow. He wasted several hours getting it out. And then, on the way back to camp, he bumped into some local tour guides and their safari guests, who'd had way better luck spotting Pavarotti.

不知怎的，拉菲克驾驶的路虎车的车轮卡在了疣猪洞穴里。他花了好几个小时才把车轮弄出来。之后，他在返回营地的路上遇到了几名当地导游和他们的观兽游客，后者要幸运得多，他们看到了“帕瓦罗蒂”。

"Basically, they laughed and they talked to me that they'd seen him that morning."

“他们笑着告诉我，他们那天早上看到它了。”

Rafiq then realized that tourist wildlife sightings might be an untapped source of information about wild animals.

拉菲克随后意识到，游客野生动物观光可能是关于野生动物的一个尚未开发的信息来源。

So he and his team worked with a safari lodge in Botswana to analyze 25,000 tourist photographs of wildlife. They used those as sightings of lions, spotted hyenas, leopards, cheetahs and wild dogs. They then compared those data to the estimates they made with traditional wildlife biology tactics: stuff like camera traps, track surveys, and "call-in stations" — where they play sounds of distressed animals in the middle of the night and see who pops by.

因此，他和团队与博茨瓦纳一家狩猎旅社合作，分析了2.5万张游客拍摄的野生动物照片。他们将这些照片作为人们对狮子、斑点鬣狗、豹子、猎豹和野狗的目击。之后，他们将这些数据与他们用传统野生动物生活学方法做出的估计进行了比较，这些方法包括相机陷阱、跟踪调查和“呼叫站”——在那里，他们会在半夜播放痛苦动物的声音，看看谁会突然出现。

It turned out that the estimates from tourist photos were just as good as those gleaned from traditional methods. And the tourists were actually the only ones to see elusive cheetahs — the researchers would have missed the cats without the citizen science data. The results are in the journal Current Biology.

结果表明，从游客照片中得到的估计结果和从传统方法中得到的一样好。事实上，游客是唯一能看到难以捉摸的猎豹的人——如果没有公民科学数据，研究人员就会错过这些猫科动物。研究结果发表在《当代生物学》期刊上。

The idea is not to put wildlife researchers out of a job. "The reality is there's so many interesting things we still have to find out about these large carnivores and so many conservation projects that need to be carried out that we don't have the time or resources to do them all."

这个想法并不是要让野生动物研究人员失业。“现实情况是，关于这些大型食物动物，我们还有很多有趣的事情需要去发现，还有很多需要开展的保护项目，但我们没有时间或资源完成所有这些工作。”

And tourist photos might help make sure that all the local carnivores are spotted.

游客照片可能有助于确保所有当地的食肉动物都被发现。

Thanks for listening for Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.

谢谢大家收听科学美国人——60秒科学。我是克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔。